


On The Banks

by bitochondria



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Denial of Feelings, Fanart, Feelings, Feelings Realization, Illustrations, Inappropriate Crush Target, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Pining, Self-Esteem Issues, Talking, Unrequited Crush, Zelos falls in love too easily, also as it turns out Regal is maybe kind of handsome, but likes to pretend he doesn't have any feelings, he also knows his weird crush on Lloyd is a big no no
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:15:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24157240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitochondria/pseuds/bitochondria
Summary: In Heimdall, on the eve of the final battle, Zelos finds himself with Regal, side by side on the edge of the water. He is forced to confront the impossibility of his feelings for one member of the party, the cruelty of his feelings towards himself, and the sneaking newness of his feelings for his late night conversation partner. (Slightly illustrated!)
Relationships: One-sided Zelos Wilder/Everyone, Regal Bryant/Zelos Wilder
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	On The Banks

Zelos was a light sleeper. Paranoid? Maybe. Alive? Yes— it had only taken one nocturnal visit from a papal assassin to convince him that too little sleep was always preferable to too little blood. 

He stirred first to a voice in the hall, and then sat up a moment later to snippets of a conversation blowing in through the half-open window. No one sounded upset, but it wouldn't exactly be the first time they had all received earth-shattering news in the middle of the night. 

He rubbed one eye with the back of his hand and looked around the room. Regal's bed had been vacated; for a big guy, he moved like a cat. Zelos wasn't certain the man even slept. They were frequently bunk mates at inns and Houses of Salvation, since Genis balked at being separated from Lloyd, and for  _ some reason _ they wouldn't let Zelos stay with the girls. Frowny-Face was constantly up in the middle of the night, probably brooding and… being penitent, or whatever it was you're supposed to do when you feel guilty about something. Initially it had been a source of immense annoyance, and then at some point Zelos had just started sleeping through it. 

Sighing, Zelos flopped his legs out of the bed and slipped only his pants on. He padded barefoot down the hall, the rough-hewn boards worn smooth enough that he was unconcerned with splinters. He swung the door open as quietly as he could and exited into the cool fog of the forest night. The inn’s porch was wet with dew, and Zelos immediately regretted his lack of footwear. He shivered.

Regal was leaning back against the wall of the inn, wearing the striped button-down pajamas of an old man. Zelos followed the big man’s gaze through the fog; he could see a flash of red leather and a flash of long blonde hair moving side by side. Lloyd’s departing laughter bounced through the silent village.

Zelos felt his stomach flip. 

Without stirring, Regal glanced at Zelos. Were it not for the handcuffs, his pose— leaning back, one leg crossed over the other, shoulders soft— might almost read as casual, or even jaunty. With the shackles, it was definitely more of a ‘but officer, I swear I wasn't loitering’ kind of look. It was ridiculous that he still had them on. 

Zelos rolled his eyes and leaned forward against the railing. “Where are  _ those two _ going in the middle of the night?”

“Lloyd said they wanted to take a walk.” Regal was still as he spoke. “But that they might go visit Dirk before the fight tomorrow.” 

“And you believed them?” Zelos scoffed, glancing backwards. “You’re a terrible chaperone.” 

Regal tilted his head down just slightly, raising his brows. His expression remained implacable. They both knew nothing untoward was going to happen, but it was the easy joke. Zelos sighed, slumping even further. 

He watched them disappear into the hazy night. 

Regal cleared his throat. Zelos could hear him shifting slightly behind him.

“You know he only has eyes for her.” His voice was quiet, but tinged with admonishment. 

Zelos felt his stomach drop again. He said nothing.

“And even if he didn’t,” Regal sighed, growing louder, “despite the way you behave, you’re an adult. He isn’t.” He stepped forward and leaned on the railing as well. Still frowning, he quirked one eyebrow up. 

Not much point in pretending, then. 

Zelos swallowed, then grinned. “Well why the hell do you think I haven’t made a move on him, huh?” 

Regal’s look darkened. Zelos felt a little like he had forgotten to turn in his homework or something. “Just because he’s too naive to realize when you’re flirting with him doesn’t mean you’re not flirting with him.” 

He flipped his hair over his shoulder and glowered. “I’m not allowed to flirt, now?” He sneered at Regal, knowing as soon as he did it how much of a petulant child he was making himself look like. “I flirt with everyone. You’ve literally seen me sweet-talk five-year-olds.” 

Sighing, Regal ran his tongue over his teeth. “Sure. But you don’t mean it. When you look at Lloyd…” 

“Okay, this conversation is over.” Zelos pushed himself up on his hands and flipped over the railing onto the grass. “I get it, it’s inappropriate, we’re good. No further need to discuss.” 

Regal watched him pace, silent and grim as ever. Zelos kicked at the wet grass, still feeling like a child. Maybe that was the problem. It’s not like anyone would look at him and think he was closer in age to Raine— Raine who had been a mother to Genis, Raine who had a real job, Raine who  _ behaved like an adult _ — than to Lloyd. 

He looked up at Regal’s stony face. Did  _ he _ ever feel like an adolescent? ...had he ever even  _ been _ an adolescent? 

“I get it,” Regal offered, clearly not dropping the subject. He pushed off from the railing and walked down the stairs. He sat on the edge of the deck, still watching Zelos shuffle around. “He’s… he has an aura. There’s something special about him.”

“Yup.” Zelos crossed his arms behind his head and pressed his tongue into the side of his cheek. Bare-chested, hips askance, he dared Regal to continue.

He didn’t. Instead he just shrugged, a tiny upward movement of his shoulders. “I’m sorry.” 

Zelos dropped his arms and breathed out through his nose. He toed the ground and turned his back on Regal, his long hair whipping behind him. 

“I just…” Zelos bit down on his tongue, the humid air making his lungs feel heavy. He took a deep breath. “I don’t understand how he can be so…” He dug for the right word. “Positive.” He peered around his shoulder. He wasn’t sure why he was telling Regal this, but the old bastard did seem to be willing to listen. He gestured with his head in the direction of the stream that ran through Heimdall. “Walk with me?”

Regal nodded and stood. Zelos wondered how long it had taken him to get used to never using his hands for balance, and if he had spent a lot of time face-planting when he was first arrested. Or, arrested himself, or whatever. Maybe that’s why his face was like that. 

Hands clasped behind his back, Zelos sauntered in a direction vaguely perpendicular to Lloyd’s, behind the inn. “Abandoned as a baby, raised by a stranger, growing up in that podunk crap heap… and then all this, finding out everything about the world and his asshole father…” Thinking about Kratos made him feel a little sick to his stomach. He didn’t want to have to kill the guy, even if he was the world’s shittiest father. He had been an okay co-conspirator, and then of course, he also had Lloyd’s face. He wasn’t sure he had the steel to murder someone with those same brown eyes. He scoffed, disgusted with everything. “I just don’t know how he keeps smiling.”

A few paces behind, looking into the darkened treetops, Regal made a kind of thinking noise. “Well… Colette’s the same way. Maybe Iselia’s not as bad as everything we’ve seen."

“No she isn’t.”

Regal waited silently for him to elaborate. 

“She’s the same as me.” He stopped. “Well, no. Not the same.” He kicked a rock into the stream, and quickly remembered he didn’t have any shoes on. He turned back to Regal with a grin. “She’s just  _ sad _ , not… rotten.” 

Regal didn’t indulge him. 

“I like Colette, but… she’s got that smile that says, ‘I’m smiling because you  _ want _ me to be smiling.’" He pointed to his own dimples, pinkies up on both hands, his head tilted a little to the side. "So I feel like as dense as she is, she's probably got me figured out." 

He stopped smiling. Why he was taking the rope Regal was giving him should probably have borne questioning, but hey, who was he to examine his self-destructive tendencies too closely. 

"Makes me feel weird letting her get close to me."

"Not just because it's easier to be mad at her if you aren't really friends?"

Zelos bit the inside of his cheek, trying not to roll his eyes. "Boss Man, I know the Lloyd thing ain't gonna happen. I don't need to blame The World's Nicest Girl for that." He failed at suppressing the eyeroll any longer. "I'm not so much of a dick that I don't want to be friendly with her or whatever. I just don't want anyone making me talk to them about my issues n' shit." He crossed his arms, sullen and, more than that, a little cold. 

"Uh-huh," Regal muttered, a smile creeping into his voice. When Zelos turned to look at him, his mouth twitched back to neutrality.

“What?” 

“Nothing, Zelos.” Subtly different than his usual permanent glower, Regal was distinctly avoiding smiling. 

Zelos looked back at the inn, far enough away through the fog that none of their companions could hear them. He brushed a spot on the side of the stream clear and sat, trying not to think about whether he was going to get back inside and shake a bunch of creepy-crawlies from his pants. Against his better judgement, he threw his legs over the side and let his feet dangle in the water. It was ball-shrinkingly freezing. 

“So why are  _ you _ up?” 

Regal sat down beside him, legs crossed. “Just thinking.”

Zelos tapped him on the knee, looking down into the stream. “Bet you’re a terrible swimmer, huh.”

Regal made a sound almost like a laugh. “Oh, I definitely drown.” 

In the distance, something rustled in the leaves. Zelos glanced discreetly at Regal from under his hair, his look disguised by the dark. He was so stone-faced. If he stopped frowning for thirty seconds, he might almost be handsome. Well, that and if he wore something to bed that didn’t make him look like he was in his nineties. And maybe got rid of the shackles. 

Actually, thinking about it, Zelos wasn’t quite sure where he landed on the shackles. 

The cold water numbed his feet. He wondered what it might feel like to just inch forward off the bank and let himself be taken away by the icy current.

“Do you trust me?” He didn’t look Regal in the eye as he asked.

Regal’s head snapped to the side. He narrowed his eyes just slightly, and then smiled for real, a thousand times more mischievous than Zelos could have imagined him capable of.

“Why, are you thinking of pushing me in?”

Zelos snorted. “Well that answers  _ that _ question.” He pulled up a clump of grass and threw it in the stream. 

Regal watched the projectile’s arc. “Yes.” He shrugged. “Ultimately.”

“Why?” Now it was Zelos’ turn to squint. “Are you just… dumb or something?”

“Yes.” 

Zelos couldn’t be certain in the darkness, but it kind of seemed like maybe Regal was rolling his eyes. 

“Seriously, why?”

Shifting his legs so he was sitting with one knee on the ground and the other about parallel with his shoulders, Regal leaned his arms against his thigh. “Zelos, I’m not going to read you a list of reasons that I trust you. You’re not a shareholder and I’m not giving you a quarterly report.”

Zelos continued to uproot bits of grass, getting dirt under his fingernails. “It’s fine to say that you don’t. I mean, I wouldn’t trust me.”

“I do, sincerely.” Regal looked at him from under his brows. “But it’s not healthy to rely on other people to enumerate the reasons you shouldn’t hate yourself.”

Zelos blinked his eyes wide. He ran his fingers through the hair on the back of his neck, twisting it over his shoulder to the front before he responded. 

He turned it into a joke. “Ouch, man.”

"All I'm saying is," Regal sighed, his voice growing uncharacteristically soft, "You don't have to like yourself. But maybe you can accept that your friends must have their reasons for choosing to care about you."

Zelos clenched his jaw and flung another clump of grass into the stream. "'Oh, hey, Pot, let me introduce you to my friend Kettle…'"

"Why do you think I'm telling you this?"

Zelos's eyes landed on Regal's shackles. He felt heat creep up the back of his neck. He put down the clump of grass he had in his hand. 

"Sorry."

They sat in silence. Crickets and katydids chirped and the wind blew through the trees. 

Zelos looked up at the fog-softened sky, hazy with stars, and felt the damp earth under his palms. The night was more beautiful than it had any right to be. If he stayed up— laid back in the dirt, stared up at the sky, spent all night sorting through his feelings— he'd be no use to Lloyd tomorrow. He sighed, pulled his legs off the bank, and used that guilt to override the self-destructive option. 

He tucked his feet beneath him and knelt forward to to rinse his hands in the stream.

"Please don't fall in," Regal admonished, rising to his feet. "I literally cannot fish you out."

"You kidding?" Zelos stood up and, with just a moment's hesitation, flicked water into Regal's face. "I'd just pull you in after me. Don’t want to wash up somewhere  _ alone _ ."

"What the hell!" Regal tried to wipe his face off on his shoulder. The angle his arms were locked at made this both impossible and quite pitiful. Even so, he didn't actually sound all that upset. 

"God, that has got to be so annoying," Zelos taunted, wiping his hands on the clean front of his pants. "You can't ever itch your nose, can you?"

He closed the distance between them and wiped the moisture off Regal's face with the backs of his fingers and then the pad of his thumb. 

Regal maintained eye contact the whole time Zelos was touching him. If it had been anyone else, he might have taken it as a come-on, but with Regal, the layers being peeled away with his eyes were definitely not his clothes.

"That might actually be the worst thing about the cuffs," Regal smirked, a tiny upturn of the right side of his mouth. 

With most people, when you got real close, any evidence of aging became more visible— little lines around the eyes and mouth, scars and pores and spots. Zelos had no compunctions sleeping with older women, so this has never concerned him. Imperfections had their own beauty (and experience usually meant better sex, to boot.)

Getting close to Regal had the opposite effect— a reminder that his “Old Man” moniker was a joke. His face was stern, with angular, prominent features, but it wasn’t haggard. His eyes, cornflower blue, were almost silvery in the darkness, and he had kind of fantastic eyelashes. If Zelos thought of him as  _ pouty _ rather than  _ frowny _ , well— well. Maybe that wasn’t a particularly smart idea. He stopped thinking about Regal’s face. 

It’s just that, underneath the regular grimace— 

If he hadn’t. If all of that—

Well.

He was a soft man, beneath all the hard edges. Or maybe he could be, at least.

Zelos swallowed and jammed his hands in his pockets. 

Regal gestured with his head. “We should go to bed.”

A nervous chuckle splashed from Zelos’s traitorous mouth. He practically snorted, “Together?” He linked his arm through Regal’s, threading the space between hard muscle and cold metal. 

Regal breathed out through his nose, narrowing his eyes. “Zelos, I have no desire to be a cipher for your crush on Lloyd.”

“That’s not a  _ no _ …” Zelos fluttered his eyelashes. He was good at turning things with a kernel of truth into jokes. And this was barely even a kernel— like he’d sleep with a mountain man like Regal. 

Even if he was actually kind of. Whatever it was he was. 

Inside, underneath the cold and the film of clamminess on his skin, Zelos’ chest felt tight.

Regal’s expression was unreadable.

“I don’t go to bed with people who are thinking about someone else.” 

Zelos felt the shrug against his shoulder, and the knot forming in his stomach.

“But you would if I wasn’t?”

Closed lips twitching inscrutably, almost imperceptibly, Regal blinked.

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

The knot unravelled into full-blown churning. Zelos was thankful for the darkness. His cheeks felt very pink.

Zelos bonked into Regal, shoulder and hips. Someone who relied on their upper body for balance would have tipped or stumbled, but Regal just gave him a dirty look.

“I only sleep with cute guys anyway,” Zelos teased, licking his lips and peering out of the corners of his eyes.

“ _ Wow _ .” Regal’s lips turned up. “If  _ that’s _ how you feel, let go of my arm, at least.”

“But I’m cold.”

“Put a shirt on next time, then.”

“And deprive everyone of all of this?” He gestured to himself with his free hand and then flipped his hair back.

Regal grumbled. “I see  _ all of that _ ,” he complained, voice laden with sarcasm, “Every night, since you apparently can’t be bothered to purchase pajamas.”

“There are women who would kill to be in your position, Pres.” Zelos cocked his head towards Regal, his cheek brushing his shoulder. There was nothing easier than playing the game he had always played. 

Except… 

“I’m hardly going to brawl with lovestruck girls, Zelos.” He breathed out through his nose, smirking slightly. 

“Not even to give me a self-esteem boost?”

_ Except…  _

Regal snorted. “I think a healthier course of action might be learning to separate your self-worth from how many suitors want to claw each others’ eyes out over you.”

Zelos brought his hand to his chest, falsely aghast. “You’d asking me to  _ gut  _ my very identity.” 

Except he was actually, maybe, underneath all the grim, kind of funny.

“Well, we can’t waste a perfectly good narcissist like that.” 

Zelos squeezed his arm tighter. Stony and durable as ever, Regal was being a very good sport about all the pawing. Zelos was fairly cautious (and commensurately picky) about flirting with men, and so most men he hit on tended to react with either interest or exceptionally suspicious mild panic. He couldn’t get anything from Regal’s response— dudes who were interested in dudes didn’t usually have such tepid reactions, but dudes who weren’t interested in dudes were rarely this calm, either. 

His placidity was moreish, a refreshing subterranean well of cold clear calm. 

“I’m so glad you understand where my value lies,” Zelos gushed breathlessly, off-balance and unsure of whether he was acting any longer. 

Regal gave Zelos a look that he couldn’t quite read in the dark. His mouth and eyelids were soft, but his gaze was steely. It could have been pity. 

Except… 

“Now if only you could figure it out.” His lips twisted into a smile. 

They walked back to the inn, arm in arm. 

And as he climbed into bed, watching Regal’s broad back, Zelos wondered if anyone else was just a little bit in love with every single one of their friends. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> When Tales of Symphonia first came out (and I was a wee stupid teenager) I remember drawing a ton of Regal/Zelos fanart. Last year, I replayed ToS for the first time in over a decade, and when I started I recall thinking: there's no way there's any possible support for that pairing in game, right? I was just blinded by teenage shipping goggles and the fact that they both had long pretty hair? 
> 
> But... there IS something there, isn't there? They see through each other in a way the other characters don't, really, and they're ultimately dealing with a lot of the same hurt in terms of perpetuating a cycle of lies and betrayal. I don't know if it's a pairing that could "work out," so to speak, but I think the idea that there might be a strange sort of mutual attraction there isn't totally out of the realm of possibility. 
> 
> So when I got to Heimdall, I wrote this, and then promptly forgot I wrote it until a few days ago. I figured, hey-- why not go back to my teenage roots for a moment?-- and drew some fanart to go with it before posting. Here's to 15 year old me, I guess, who maybe wasn't actually so far off the mark, after all.


End file.
